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The issue of same-gender sexual identity has challenged our understanding of psychological development and psychological intervention throughout the century just past and continues to provoke discussion in the century upon us. Over the past three decades, psychoanalysis advanced toward a contemporary perspective, which holds that the dynamics of sexual orientation must be an important element of the psychoanalytic process, but must be approached without prejudice regarding the outcome of analytic exploration of wish and desire. Taken together, the essays in Rethinking Psychoanalysis and the Homosexualities, a thematic volume of The Annual of Psychoanalysis, provide a developmentally grounded and clinically consequential enlargement of this basic premise. The result is a timely overview of contemporary approaches to the study of sexual orientation within psychoanalysis that highlights issues salient to clinical work with lesbian and gay patients. The section on'The Meaning of Sexualization in Clinical Psychoanalysis'demonstrates the importance of psychoanalytic study of same-gender desire and sexual orientation for analyst and analysand alike. Philips considers the analyst's own sexual identity as a factor shaping the analysand's experience of sexuality, whereas Shelby, Lynch, Roughton, and Young-Bruehl, from their various perspectives, address the problem of stigma and prejudice as they distort same-gender desire and same-gender sexual identity. Two concluding sections of the book explore the implications of a clinical psychoanalytic perspective for the study of gay and lesbian lives. Timely and essential reading for all mental health professionals, Rethinking Psychoanalysis and the Homosexualities underscores the profound distance traversed by psychoanalysis in arriving at its contemporary understandings of gender, sexual identity, and sexual desire.

Psychoanalysis and Women, Volume 32 of The Annual of Psychoanalysis, is a stunning reprise on theoretical, developmental, and clinical issues that have engaged analysts from Freud on. It begins with clinical contributions by Joyce McDougall and Lynne Layton, two theorists at the forefront of clinical work with women; Jessica Benjamin, Julia Kristeva, and Ethel Spector Person, from their respective vantage points, all engage the issue of passivity, which Freud tended to equate with femininity. Employing a self-psychological framework, Christine Kieffer returns to the Oedipus complex and sheds new light on the typically Pyrrhic oedipal victory of little girls.Section III broadens the historical context of contemporary theorizing about women by offering the personal reminiscences of Nancy Chodorow, Carol Gilligan, Brenda Solomon, and Malkah Notman. A final section, dedicated to'women who shared psychoanalysis,'features historical essays on Ida Bauer (Freud's'Dora'), Anna Freud, Dorothy Burlingham, Edith Jacobson, and Therese Benedek, along with Linda Hopkins's revealing interview of Marion Milner. Of special note is Marian Tolpin's examination of three women - Bauer, Helene Deutch, and Anna Freud - who helped shape Freud's notion of the'femail castration complex,'and Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's exploration of how two women - Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham - developed parent-infant observation.Psychoanalysis and Women is an extraordinary chronicle of the distance traveled since Freud characterized women's sexual life as'the dark continent.'The contributors vitalize a half century of theory with the lessons of biography, and they broaden clinical sensibilities by drawing on recent developmental, gender-related, and socio-psychological research. In doing so, they attest to the ongoing reconfiguration of Freud's dark continent and show the psychoanalytic psychology of women to be very much a revolution in progress.

In 1958 William L. Langer, in a well-known presidential address to the American Historical Association, declared the informed use of psychoanalytic depth psychology as'the next assignment'for professional historians. Psychoanalysis and History, volume 31 of The Annual of Psychoanalysis, examines the degree to which Langer's directive has been realized in the intervening 45 years. Section I makes the case for psychobiography in the lives of historical figures and exemplifies this perspective with analytically informed studies of the art of Wassily Kandinsky; the films of Stanley Kubrick; and the anti-Semitism of Adolf Hitler. Section II reviews Freud's own psychohistorical contributions and then considers the relevance to historical inquiry of the more recent perspectives of Winnicott, Kernberg, and Kohut. Section III explores an intriguing tributary of psychobiographical inquiry: the impact of the biographer's own subjectivity on his or her work. Section IV turns to a topic of perennial interest: the psychobiographical study of American presidents. Section V turns to the special challenges of applying psychoanalysis to topics of religious history and includes topical studies of religious figures as disparate as the 15th century Asian Drukpa Kunley and Osama bin Laden. Section VI focuses on the recent extension of psychohistorical inquiry to groups of people and to cultural phenomena more generally: an investigation of the youth movement in pre-Nazi Germany; consideration of how societies, no less than individuals, reenact and work through traumas over time; and an outline of the role of analysis in constructing a depth-psychological'social psychology'of use to historians. These papers, no less than those that precede them, are compelling testimony to the claim with which editors James William Anderson and Jerome A. Winer begin the volume, to wit, that'Psychoanalysis would seem to be a resource indispensable to the study of history.'

Sigmund Freud and His Impact on the Modern World, volume 29 of The Annual of Psychoanalysis, is a comprehensive reassessment of the influence of Sigmund Freud. Intended as an unofficial companion volume to the Library of Congress's exhibit,'Sigmund Freud: Conflict and Culture,'it ponders Freud's influence in the context of contemporary scientific, psychotherapeutic, and academic landscapes.Beginning with James Anderson's biographical remarks, which are geared specifically to the objects on display in the Library of Congress exhibit, and Roy Grinker Jr.'s more personal view of Freud, the volume branches out in various directions in an effort to comprehend the multidimensional and multidisciplinary richness of Freud's contribution. In section II, we find authoritative summaries of Freud's scientific contributions, of his continuing impact as a thinker, of his notion of symbolization in the context of recent neuroscientific findings, and of his status as a'cultural subversive'. In section III, contributors hone in on more specific aspects of Freud's legacy, such as an experimental method to review how Freud's idea of childhood sexuality has fared and a look at the women who became analysts in the United States. In the concluding section of the volume, contributors turn to Freud's influence in various humanistic disciplines: literature, drama, religious studies, the human sciences, the visual arts, and cinema. With this scholarly yet highly accessible compilation, the Chicago Institute provides another service to its own community and to the wider reading public. Sure to enhance the experience of all those attending'Sigmund Freud: Conflict and Culture,'Sigmund Freud and His Impact on the Modern World will appeal to anyone desirous of an up-to-date overview of the man whose work shaped the psychological sensibility of the century just past and promises to reverberate throughout the century just born.